Fruit-flavored dry beverage mixes, packaged in viewable containers enjoy widespread commercial success. Such mixes include natural sweeteners, acidulents and flavors like orange-oil and optionally may have added thereto vitamin and mineral supplements. A particular beverage mix is desirably edified by the inclusion of a coloring agent to further suggest product flavor.
Such mixes should be uniformly blended so that when viewed in a transparent container they provide a color hue that is pleasing and suggestive of the flavor being intended. The sweetener particles, crystalline sucrose, of such beverage mixes have been colored beforehand by coloring solutions plated onto the sucrose. Moisture added by such color plating necessitates presence of tricalcium phosphate particles to promote flowability in mixing and packaging and curtail lumping and caking of the beverage mix as packaged.
When incorporating the aforesaid edifying functional ingredients either for flavor or nutritional fortification, the amount of mixing and blending can be quite extended. Sucrose crystals color-plated with a solution may require in the order of, say, 5 to 10 minutes to achieve the color uniformity intended. During this time the color-plated sucrose particles may undergo fracture by reason of particle-to-particle abrasion such that the white crystalline interior of the particles will be exposed; this detracts from the overall color impression intended by lessening color hue. Moreover, as the hue of a given color darkens, particularly, say, for a flavor like grape, the amount of mixing for uniform blendings is protracted; crystal fracture of color-plated sucrose can decrease hue significantly.
It is an object of the present invention to provide a readily uniformly blended dry beverage mix containing color-plated sweetener particles offering a hue that provides a strong color intensity thereby providing an overall improved organoleptic response and esthetic enhancement of the mix.
In some applications, beverage mix formulations may have therein hygroscopic agents such as fixed oils which may be employed for clouding or other functions and are prone to clumping or eccentricities in flowability. Use of tricalcium phosphate to minimize these variations in blending and packaging is not always completely operative to eliminate the tendency towards lumping or caking of the beverage mix. When attempting to color plate by application of an aqueous solution of coloring solutes, there is an increase in the level of moisture on the sucrose crystals in a given mix; this increase can aggravate the lumping problem. In many food mix applications, therefore, it will be desirable to employ coloring means which limit the amount of water present in the mix ingredients or that may be added to the mix. Yet, to achieve this objective requires the provision of coloring means which have a significant intensity or hue development.